Adirondack Wild To Honor Julia Goren, Phil Brown

Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve is set to present Julia Goren, coordinator of the Adirondack High Peaks Summit Stewardship program, with its 2018 Wild Stewardship Award, and Phil Brown, former editor of the Adirondack Explorer magazine, with its 2018 Paul Schaefer Wilderness Award.

They will be recognized at Adirondack Wild’s Annual Meeting of Members and Friends on Saturday November 3, 2018 in the Saranac Lake Free Library, 101 Main Street, Saranac Lake.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Registration starts at 10 am, meeting starts at 11 am and concludes at 3 pm.

Advance registration is requested by Friday, October 26th. To find an agenda and to register, click here.

Julia Goren has been with the Summit Stewardship Program as an employee of the Adirondack Mountain Club since 2006, first as Botany Steward and later as the program’s first full-time coordinator. An avid hiker and alpine plant enthusiast, Julia received her M.S. in Environmental Studies from Antioch University. The Summit Stewardship program is a partnership of the Adirondack Mountain Club, the Adirondack Nature Conservancy, and the NYS Dept. of Environmental Conservation. The program employs education, research and trail work to protect the last remaining alpine habitat in New York State, 80 vulnerable acres atop Marcy, Algonquin, Wright, Colden, Cascade and fifteen other High Peaks that have alpine vegetation. The Summit Stewardship program was started in 1990 at the initiative of Dr. Edwin “Ketch” Ketchledge, professor, botanist, hiker, scientist and steward.

Adirondack Wild’s highest honor, the Paul Schaefer Wilderness Award, will be presented to Phil Brown for his nearly 20 years of Adirondack journalism leadership and excellence as editor of the Adirondack Explorer magazine. Brown not only assigned and edited countless Explorer articles about Adirondack Park’s people, wilderness environments, wildlife, policies, recreational opportunities and community life, but covered and wrote many of the articles himself and hiked, climbed, skied and paddled most of the places he wrote about. He also found time to write and edit many Adirondack books, including Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks (2006, Syracuse University Press).

The award is named after Paul Schaefer (1908-1996), founder of Friends of the Forest Preserve and leader of the Adirondack Park’s 20th century wilderness coalition which defended Article XIV, the “forever wild” clause of the NYS constitution, from multiple attacks, defeated dozens of projects to dam Adirondack free-flowing rivers, including the South Branch of the Moose and the upper Hudson Rivers, and successfully pushed for designated wilderness within the NYS Forest Preserve. For more about Schaefer, visit Adirondack Wild’s website.